If You’re Linking This It’s Too Late

arizona

Slow news week last time around. Will try to pick up for this one ;)

“A skateboard is the most basic ambulatory machine. It has no gears, offers no assistance. It will protect you from nothing. It is a tool for falling. For failure. But also for freedom. For living. On a skateboard you must stay balanced in a tempest of forces beyond your control. The key is to be brave, get low, stay up and keep rolling.”

Remember when Chad Fernandez got snubbed for that Oscar? Damn.

“Late Night TV,” a New York and Philly night footage montage.

Sorta relevant: NY Skateboarding rounded up all the indoor spots in New York.

Ride rounded up a brief history of skate company videos, a.k.a. the “stepchildren of wheel video productions.” The Lordz video barely even counts as a wheel video. 1) Who has ever seen, let alone rode, a set of Lordz wheels? and 2) It’s better than most board and shoe company videos from that decade.

Chad is a 16-minute New York video by Sam Fickinger showcasing an activity that you could resume performing outside in about a month or so.

Mike Blabac unearthed some rare photos of Rickk, Carroll, others from the nineties.

Security guards aren’t the brightest bunch, international edition.

Always hear a lot of great things about Glasgow, so got a kick out of this interview / video about skateboarding in Scotland.

“‘In Syria, I couldn’t go out and play because of the war, but in Amman I can enjoy my time, stay out late and make new friends at the skate park,’ nine-year-old Ahmed Rayen, who has been in Jordan for two years, told Al Jazeera.” There are kids out there who cannot go skate because there is a fucking war going outside of their homes. It’s cold, but you don’t have it that bad dude.

#TBT on a Monday: Grandpa was / is a really good skateboarder #heelflip

Some Phone Vids: Happy 2015 from Mira Conyo, “Thirsty

QS Sports Desk: This looked like it was going over the top of the backboard, until…yeah, Steph for MVP. Harden is boring. Also, the Amare Stoudemire “era” is officially over in New York. It panned out like every other Knicks decision of the past 15 years, but Nov-Dec 2010, when the Amare-Felton-Gallinari-Chandler-Landry team really started to gel, is literally the fondest Knicks-related memory — save maybe Chris Childs punching Kobe or the occasional J.R. Smith hero game — of these grim fifteen years. Hopefully Marc Gasol knows better than to take Dolan’s money in July.

Quote of the Week: “Quartersnacks? What’s up with that? Is that like the same thing as the Dunk?” — Queens Mall Zumiez Employee

Tell Plan B to get it together and send that.

Brooklyn is Turning Into the Last 3 Days of Burning Man

baton rouge bank

Via Chrome Ball’s Ray Barbee post from last Friday.

After earning the “Best Instagram Post by a Pro Skater” award for 2012, Mike Carroll is already the frontrunner for this year’s honors, too.

Off the Braxx is an upcoming project by the same crew behind 2010’s Film Me and Goin’ Ham videos. They uploaded a seven-minute throwaway reel featuring Stephan Martinez, Nate Rojas, Jamel Marshall and a few others. (Sidebar 1: Isn’t in counterintuitive to kick someone on a skateboard in midair, and then cite litigious reasons for why they cannot skate there? Sidebar 2: Is 8Ball and MJG’s debut album making the 2013 #trendwatch…twenty years after its release?)

Skateboarding is ridiculous.

The friends section from the NJ-based In Crust We Trust video is now online. Filmed in the cuttiest corners of Jersey and features a Lenox the Menace cameo.

While on the topic of cutty spots, Skate Jawn has a new Dylan James part.

Brian Kelley went to everybody’s favorite late-night dirty Chinese food restaurant and shot a cool lookbook for Huf with some familiar faces.

Despite several requests, is there really a point in re-editing raw Mark Suciu footage? Given his status as (what looks like) the most productive skater working today, it is realistic that he would have a new part out before any re-edits were completed.

Yet another case for the front of Union Square’s continued return to relevance!

Barmuda Triangle News: Minor Barmuda Triangle pinpoint / “The Fish is too crowded and I want to drink because I’m sad”-destination, Motor City, will be closing up this spring. Also, there are rumblings of everybody’s childhood favorite Ludlow establishment facing a similar fate in the near future.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: Kyrie Irving’s crossover on Brandon Knight in the rookie sophomore game. Between Kyrie (from West Orange) and Kenneth Faried (from Newark), New Jersey’s future in the NBA looks bright.

Quote of the Week: “Kendrick Lamar reminds me of a rapper from late era 411.” — Jack Sabback

Don’t you guys miss when Brooklyn was like the first three days of Burning Man?

New Year’s Eve Links

neon

Philadelphia is on the verge of having to close 37 public schools. It’s a good thing Philly’s City Council spends time on real issues like raising skateboard-related fines.

Pappalardo’s eight seconds of footage in the Pretty Sweet bonus features.

The end-of-the-year issue of The NYT Magazine has a feature on influential people who passed away in 2012. One of them profiles Larry Stevenson, who invented kicktails on modern skateboards, and is thus responsible for every big flip in Pretty Sweet and every crooked grind combo in Parental Advisory.

Speaking of Pretty Sweet, Manolo Tapes put together a funny, all lifestyle rendition of the video entitled Pretty Soft. The magic of editing…

Joe Cups put together a Super-8 / VHS New York video of this past summer that features many names from the Lurkers franchise.

This James Pitonyak part is gnarly. He destroys just about every spot in Trenton.

The first, all Mini DV installment of the Death Video series. Not to be confused with Death Skateboards; it’s just a bunch of kids ripping around the city and indulging confrontation with security more than they probably should.

An iPhone Christmas clip from the young’ns.

Brian Brown and the 2nd Nature crew ripping around Westchester and Connecticut.

ICYMI: Billy McFeely in Outdated, Jason Carroll in Outdated, Forrest Edwards in Wild Power, and Ben Kadow in Mama’s Boys.

Matt Mooney put his abundance of free time into creating a Seinfeld Tumblr.

Spot Updates: Rolls-Royce is surrounded by scaffolding.

QS Sports Desk Play of the Week: Darren Collison’s buzzer-beating, overtime-forcing desperation three v.s. Oklahoma City. J.R’s buzzer-beater v.s. the Suns was a leading candidate, but all Knicks plays from the past week got disqualified based on how hard they blew it against the Kings on Friday.

Quote of the Week:

hsu skate videos

— Via the Skateboarder Tumblr. Not sure of its origins or how old it is. Solid analogy.

Happy New Year.

Going Solo, First CD Out That’s Not Slow-Mo

After repeatedly giving The New York Times a hard time about this awful article, we have to give them credit for a great Times Magazine feature on skateboarding in Uganda. Is there any way this generation’s student loan debt could get funneled towards building skateparks in Uganda instead of going back to some stupid bank?

Also in the realm of reputable-mainstream-publications-writing-about-skating, The New Yorker has a solid article about Transworld‘s “30 Most Influential” list. (Here’s the QS post from last winter regarding the “most influential” subject.)

Most have seen this by now, but Josh Stewart filmed a “Night in the Life”-type segment with Jahmal Williams and the Hopps team for the “RIDE” channel on YouTube. Jahmal Williams footage + black & white = always a win.

“As PJLWHL recedes into skate lore, the narrative of how a couple dudes from Boston with impeccable musical taste founded a shop that produced the one of the most transcendent video parts ever remains almost as interesting as the video itself. Shit would be a sick movie. Kids meets Empire Records, if you will.” Frozen in Carbonite on The Beatles, The Stones, Oasis, Stereolab, dubbing skate videos, PJ Ladd’s Wonderful Horrible Life, Palace, and City of Rats.

Cutty Brooklyn spots and annoying video effects. Thanks, art school.

One of those kids who slept outside Supreme for a pair of sneakers last week got caught out there so bad. “Sneaker culture” taking cues from frat / drunk-white-people-at-college-parties culture.

Coda Skateboards took a trip up to Boston.

There’s another part from the 2nd Nature-endorsed PFP2: See You Lazer video on YouTube. That bump-to-5050 on University and 13th is gnarly (@ 1:15) considering he’s more-or-less grinding a concrete booger sticking out of a wall.

People are making ceiling fans out of skateboards. People are bored.

In a tremendous blow to the world of online skateboarding content, Skate.ly removed all 411 issues from its library. Does anyone have a link for the Roc-A-Fella issue?

Spot Updates: 1) The Parks Department filled in the crack at Tompkins. E.J. is bummed. 2) Those rails on 95th and Columbus, which maybe three people skate every year, are blocked off by scaffolding.

Quote of the Week: “My day date got rained out, so I texted her that night saying ‘It looks like a dry evening, unless I make you wet later.'” – G-Man


Slim Thug, T.I. & Bun B > Clooney, Cube & Wahlberg > Rick Ross, Dr. Dre & Jay-Z

2012: When You Could No Longer Make the Case For Physical Copies of Skate Videos

What do dinosaurs, the Dodo bird, championship-level basketball in New York, The Wiz stores, VHS tapes, and DVDs all have in common?

Apple was able to slim down the laptop, which will start at $2,200 for a model with a 15.4-inch screen, by eliminating its DVD drive…Apple’s move to drop the DVD drive echoes past moves by the company to drop technologies in its machines, like floppy-disk drives, that it viewed as outmoded, even though some consumers initially grumbled about the changes.The New York Times (June 11, 2012)

Apple’s direction seems like a decent gauge of where technology is heading.

The majority of your favorite independent skate videos are likely edited on MacBooks. Now that Apple is scrapping the DVD drive, hard-copy loyalists (the same sort of people content with spending $1K+ a year on VX1000 repairs…or only listening to music on vinyl) will need to suffer the inconveniences of older technologies to keep the format they grew up with alive. HD did not kill off Mini DV the day it came out, and iTunes skate video downloads did not immediately end DVD production, but this seems pretty close to the end for any future additions to your DVD shelf. Skate videos will get to a point where only legitimate, money-making companies shell out resources on discs to keep the older crowd happy; it is just hard to imagine a shop/independent video going through the hassle of producing something that so few people buy anyway. (Especially if most laptops won’t have a place to insert the disc three years from now.)

Yeah Right! comes to mind as the last major skate video to be released on VHS. It would make sense if the Chocolate video is the last one to come out on a disc. R.I.P. DVDs, you had a good ten-year run. You’ll be missed.

“I organize my past based on skate videos, based on the emotions I got from them, the ideas they gave me. I don’t know what’s going to happen now that videos are online, and there’s so much to choose from. I hope there’s a resurgence of hard, physical, collectable videos.” — Jake Johnson, 2011

That would be great, but it doesn’t look like it is going to happen.